Start-up of the month: Waylay – connecting IoT to business processes

Internet of Business spends five minutes with Waylay co-founder and CEO, Piet Vandaele, discussing the need for an “orchestration” platform that enables the integration of IoT within existing business processes.

What is Waylay?

Waylay is a cloud-to-cloud integration platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). Waylay connects Internet-of-Things solutions with IT applications and cloud services empowering enterprises to build automations, system integrations and new applications faster than ever before.

How does the platform work?

We come to the market with a different story and, although we offer our technology as a “platform”, we are not what is currently understood as a classic IoT platform. IoT platforms today focus on secure device onboarding, storage and visualization.

We bring state-of-the-art integration capabilities on top of that. Our patented rules-engine enables powerful automations that go way beyond what is currently available on the market.

To unleash the power of the Internet-of-Everything (IoE) you must connect people, devices, software applications and online services. Just connecting “things” in a closed system that works in parallel with everything else will not provide enough value for money.

Waylay is a service orchestration platform that seamlessly connects all the dots.

How did you develop the technology?

Waylay’s founding team has been active in the M2M and automation space for a very long time. The main vision and an early prototype of the technology were already there when the company was founded. From then onwards, we collected customer feedback early and improved the product iteratively towards what it has become today.

Why is there a need for this?

Almost any IoT project starts with securely and reliably connecting devices and collecting data. Once that has been accomplished, the question arises how do we now create business value out of this data?

It turns out that in a lot of cases, the ability to integrate IoT with existing business process and customer touch points is a crucial factor in achieving that potential.

We have created the Waylay orchestration platform to solve this problem by providing scalable and reliable interoperability and integration across multi-vendor IoT solutions and enterprise IT systems. That’s why we are claiming that Waylay’s orchestration technology transforms IoT solutions into business solutions.

Who is Waylay targeting?

Waylay is a horizontal technology platform applicable in multiple verticals. At the moment we are focusing on certain verticals where we have several projects in development: logistics, utilities, retail, smart city, smart home.

We are a B2B technology company and our target audience is made up mostly of B2B enterprises and sometimes also B2C. They have typically already identified a particular use case of IoT for their business and some have even started an IoT project and are now struggling with various issues such as integration or multi-vendor interoperability.

Are there any pilot programs you can share?

The common denominator across Waylay’s deployments is the need to monitor remote assets in a scalable way, often in very heterogeneous multi-vendor environments. Waylay’s technology has been successfully applied for smart water metering, asset management, smart home applications, multi-vendor HVAC monitoring and smart city applications.

How is the company funded?

Waylay completed a seed funding round of €1.2 million in December 2016. This allowed us to expand our business internationally in a faster way and to work in a more systematic way on establishing partnerships.

What are your future ambitions for Waylay?

Waylay is and wants to remain the best IoT orchestration platform in the market, connecting IoT platforms, IT systems and mobile front-ends. Waylay is rooted in the belief of a strong convergence between IoT and the API economy which will lead to tremendous opportunities for automation.

Finally, what are the biggest challenges for a start-up in the IoT market?

Though most business understand IoT as a concept and the benefits it can bring in terms of service innovation and operational efficiency improvements, it is still early days in terms of mass roll-out.